Information Highway Robbery: Accessing the Internet in London

You may have noticed a gap in my blog posting over the last week — I was in London. Had a great time (thanks for asking). We stayed at the Kensington Holiday Inn which isn’t at all bad and wonderfully located when you’re doing the tourist thing. My biggest complaint? The cost of wired Internet access in the rooms was 15UKP (that’s about $28) per day! Wireless access (which required going down to the lobby!) wasn’t much cheaper at 10UKP per day or 6UKP per hour! On a long stay you could go broke. What really surprised me about these prices was that England is so wedded to the ‘Net (at least that’s how it appeared to me from ads on TV and in the papers) that you’d expect a more competitive comms environment but that apparently isn’t the case — the concierge told me that the hotel’s pricing was in line with other hotels in the area. The hotel’s Internet service was provided by iBahn and it wasn’t good. There seemed to be a frequent but transitory fault that cutoff the physical connection to the rooms and on my last day there the link just wasn’t there for more than ten minutes when I returned to my room which was pretty annoying as I had paid for and used the connection in the morning. I phoned iBahn’s tech support using the toll free number on the access point’s instructions and just as I got the tech the connection came back (a total elapsed wasted time of about 20 minutes) . The waste of time was annoying but not half as annoying my final hotel bill which included a 1UKP charge for the toll free call! While the cost of Internet access at this hotel was excessive I’m sure it isn’t the worst. Despite extensive Googling so far I haven’t found any surveys on the topic. So, what’s the best and worst pricing you’ve found and where?